My morning of hell... and an eye (and nose)-opening discovery

Question: What's worse than having a boss that takes homicidal dumps which turn the entire work area into a biohazard?

Answer: Having a boss that takes homicidal dumps which turn the entire work area into a biohazard... and the boss has an intestinal virus.

It was this seventh layer of hell that greeted me this morning. I walk into the back room before the store opens, and I am immediately greeted with the unfathomably putrid stench of an executive steamer being laid in our hapless restroom. Besides making me wish that I
had stayed in bed this morning, it brought to mind a curious discovery I had made a few nights earlier.

Over the weekend, I was on a ladder changing fluorescent lights in the back room. Now, we have an "open" ceiling, with no suspension panels, which I guess is supposed to look retro or something. The bathroom, however, is just a small, sheet-rock room, partitioned
off from the rest of the back room. The sheet rock, however, doesn't extend all the way to the main ceiling, so one could look down on the ceiling of the bathroom from a high vantage point. So, from my perch on the ladder, I spotted the duct leading from the bathroom fan, which is supposed to lead outside, and therefore sparing the occupants of the back room from getting asphyxiated from the odors inside the bathroom. In theory, at least. Our bathroom duct, I discovered, lead to... NOTHING! It was never hooked up to the outside exhaust! All the fan was doing was clearing out the bathroom, and ventilating right into the back room, for all its occupants (me) to enjoy. Lovely.

Back to this morning. About 20 minutes after arriving to a vomitous parcel of fecal  swill, my boss went back into the bathroom, and I heard the unmistakeable grunting and gas-passage that signaled the start of another assault on my olfactory. As I put my head in my hands, wondering why I was being forced to endure such inhuman suffering, he exited the bathroom with this doomsday declaration: "Boy, my stomach's not feeling too good today. I'm going to be in the bathroom a lot today." At this point, I was contemplating writing a letter to the Discovery Channel, wondering if they wanted to film an episode of Dirty Jobs here.

Two hours later, he was exiting the bathroom for the fourth time. By this point, my work area was scarcely recognizable. The atmosphere bore a close resemblance to the surface of Venus. Distorting ripples filled the air. I could feel individual cells in my body
rupturing, along with my DNA being re-written back to Neanderthal levels. As I fought the urge to forego the English language and start grunting to people, I was miraculously --and quite unexpectedly -- saved by a most unlikely source: my boss's wife, the bookkeeper. As he sat back down, she turned to him and blurted out, "Will you just go home before you kill everybody here!"

The look on my boss's face was priceless: a totally shocked expression, as if he had no idea that his defecations were rewriting chemistry books worldwide. Nonetheless, he grabbed his keys, and left, to my brain-damaged joy.

After he left, I walked up to her, dropped to my knees, and kissed her hand in gratitude. I informed her about the bathroom vent problem, and she promised that she would get my boss to get the problem fixed. I'm not holding my breath, though... at least until his
next bathroom visit.